Job Seekers are Marketers

Marketers and Job Seekers Have a Lot in Common

Last week I taught my second Facebook and Twitter for Marketers workshop, sponsored by the American Marketing Association. As I prepare to launch new educational content for job seekers, I can’t help but point out the similarities between the two.

My AMA workshops are attended by gainfully employed people who have marketing responsibilities. They attend these workshops to gain insights and understanding into how to market their company’s products and services using Facebook and Twitter. Incidentally, we discuss social media strategy too, not just how to use Facebook and Twitter.

Attendees of my seminars on Social Networking for Job Seekers are generally unemployed or underemployed people. They attend to gain insights and understanding into how to leverage social networking strategies to find job opportunities.

While it’s obvious that one group is trying to do good work for their employer and the other group is trying to find good work, I see some similarities. The remarkable similarity is that both groups have the opportunity to build and market a brand, conduct valuable market research to find new opportunities, engage with people who can influence others on your behalf and build relationships with people who can influence desired actions.

When I teach my workshops to marketers I’m constantly stressing the importance of developing a content strategy and engaging with relevant people through your content. I also stress offering a relevant call-to-action (CTA) as often as possible, but letting your content do the selling, not your CTA. The CTA is just the conversion strategy supported by your good content.

I offer the exact same advice to job seekers. By producing good content through a blog, through LinkedIn Answers, through ongoing engagement in relevant groups on LinkedIn and Facebook, through videos and podcasts, ebooks, white papers, just to name a few, job seekers can build their own personal brand and attract new opportunities.

Job Seekers Should Advertise

Marketers have so many viable channels in which to advertise now. If you’re a B2C company, Facebook is most likely very viable for your advertising. If you’re a B2B company, LinkedIn is likely a very viable channel to advertise and possibly Facebook too. But, what about advertising by job seekers?

Job seekers should consider advertising themselves on Facebook. The ability to target specific companies and people according to their likes and interests makes Facebook a very viable place to advertise your skills. If you don’t have the money to pay for it, consider doing a trade in services with someone to sponsor you. However, Facebook advertising can be very low cost especially if you narrow your target for your ad. For example, let’s say you’re looking for a position at a technology company. You can select people over a certain age that work at specific companies. In the example below, I’ve selected a handful of companies. The total number of people who fit these criteria is only 1,100 in the U.S. This is a simple example, but you can see that by targeting a very narrow demographic, you can keep your advertising costs very low.

During my recent two day workshop with marketers in New York City, I often thought about how the strategies and tactics we reviewed are so applicable to job seekers. The advertising example I’ve shared in this post is just one example.

If you’re a job seeker or you know one, I hope this one example provides some inspiration into how being a job seeker is, in so many ways the same as being a marketer.

If you’re a marketer and know a job seeker, I invite you to share this post with them where they can download my jobseeker slides.

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